Re: Speaking your Mind
I think this thread has mostly run its course, but there's a point in here
that's extremely important to me that I can't leave unsaid.
Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> writes:
> and btw, just about celebrating hispanic heritage... the Spanish were
> responsible (with a bunch of other European countries) for destroying
> several cultures in the Americas (and elsewhere), slaughtering people
> and what not and you want to celebrate this? (Same for most other
> European cultures...)
> And, for the love of baby jesus^wdevil, please dont even think about
> celebrating religions.
The intent of recognizing the Hispanic heritage of project members, if
that's meaningful to them, is not to sanction everything Hispanic or
Spanish people have done in history. The intent of recognizing a
religious day of significance to some project members is not to endorse or
celebrate the religion. It's to celebrate and support the *people* in the
project for whom this matters.
I want it to be possible to simultaneously be troubled by or even outright
disagree with something that is significant to someone else, and also
celebrate with them the positive and affirming aspects of what that thing
means *to them*, and how it enriches their lives.
To be clear, this should be strictly optional. If someone has
particularly strong feelings, they should be able to opt out of
participating in that celebration with no questions asked and no offense
taken. (And yes, I realize that's what makes a temporary logo change
tricky, because while I don't think of it this way, I can see how people
may feel like this is forcing them to participate in a way.) But it's
still important to me to make a space for this in communities, because
people's celebrations are part of their identity and part of who they are,
in much the same way that writing long emails to mailing lists is part of
my identity and part of who I am, and I'd get very grumpy if I had to
suppress that. :)
For example (chosen because I think it may be less common to some readers
and therefore a bit less loaded; apologies in advance if I botch something
I'm not personally that familiar with), I'm personally an atheist. For
various reasons, I have extremely strong feelings about religion and its
role in history, and they're not very positive ones. I also have some
strong feelings about some aspects of the cross-section of religion and
politics in India at the moment. But I still want to make space for
project members to celebrate Diwali in a way that's meaningful to them,
and support that, and I want to support that in areas of shared
universality: food, beautiful displays of light, and so forth. It doesn't
mean that I agree with everything they may believe. It means that I see
the human being in my fellow member of the project, I see that person as
an individual with cultural and religious traditions that are important
*to them* even if they aren't to me, and I want them to feel welcome and
seen as their whole selves.
This can be a tricky balancing act, to be sure. Religion, politics,
humor, offense, discrimination, identity, bigotry, history, and oppression
are all tangled together and incredibly complex and fraught. But, to me,
asking people to leave their moments of celebration outside of the project
and to limit their project presence to purely technical contributions is
essentially to ask them to cut off all of the parts of themselves that do
not fit into the stereotypical norm of a Debian project contributor. And
that stereotypical norm is not politically neutral. It looks a lot like
the base beliefs of a white man from Europe, the United States, Australia,
or Canada.
I have lost track of who said this, but some wise person once said that
one's politics are defined by what you don't think should be political.
The things I find perfectly normal and ordinary and that I am astonished
that anyone would disagree with are, in some foundational way, my core
political beliefs. By asking people to confine themselves to that set of
behavior, I'm not being politically neutral, even though it feels like
that to me.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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